Tuesday, June 3, 2008

A Great FREE Photo Editor

I've been having a dilemma ever since I graduated from college and could no longer use my school's Adobe Photoshop to edit my work. I absolutely loovvve Photoshop but boy is it expensive and on my hourly wage I cannot afford it. So I started looking for a new way to edit my photos.

For a while I had been using Google's Picasa2, which is great for basic editing and resizing, etc, but it lacks the advanced tools I used with Photoshop. My main goal was to find a program with which I could add my copyright to my photos that I sell on ANiemanPhotography. Since I sell my photo's as image files I did not want anyone to be able to copy paste my images onto their computer. Adding the copyright limits the use of these photos. I also resize the images to prevent theft as well.

The first thing I did was search the internet using one of my favorite sites Downloads.com This is a site that you can use to download programs for free, either free programs of free trails of programs. After some searching and reading of user ratings I found PhotoSccape.

Photoscrape is great to use for resizing, brightening, adjusting color and adding text. There are also some cool affects you can use to blurr unwanted company names. Like I did for my coffee cozy photo's, where I used a Leading coffee chain's coffee cup and blurred out any promotional type.

Another one of my favorite tools is the screen capture. This tool allows you to take a "picture" or screen shot of your computer. This can contain the either the full screen, the window or just a region of the page. I used it in my last post to put a picture of my hearts. I just updated it and they added some new tools such as splitter and layering. I have yet to play around with them but will soon.

I think this program would be great for Etsians who don't want to pay a ton for a photo editing program yet be able to edit their photos so they look wonderful in their shop.